“Why come back, Rath? After gaining your freedom, you return to be killed?”
“You’re no king, Krush. You never were. Your father knew it, and so does everybody else. Surrender now, and I will show you more mercy than you ever intended to show me.”
The nerve. The absolute nerve. Killing him will be immensely satisfying. I should thank him, really, for being a traitor.
“Rath! No!” She keeps shouting, as if her words hold some weight. He has let these humans think they have influence over him. He has manipulated and used them all. Humans are creatures who live in hope, and Rath K’zar knows how to be what someone wants him to be.
He was the perfect soldier my father was looking for. He was the ultimate lover his unfortunate human mate wanted—until he wasn’t. Now he is playing another role, this time for Tusk.
“You think you will be king, Rath?”
“I think I already am. Your sad death has already been beamed to every augmentation in Megaris. Listen.”
As if on perfect cue, the mourning bells begin to toll out over the entire city. They are only played when a king dies.
Maybe I was wrong. Maybe they do not intend to allow me to live.
I launch myself at Rath. He is not expecting it. It is the only chance I have to survive. My claws sink into his skin. I know his weaknesses. I know that there are wires trammeling his body and nodes of control scattered through his flesh. The bells are still tolling for me as I claw them out, pulling parts of a physical network right out of his traitorous flesh. He is like a spider web of wires beneath that flesh of his. He bleeds copper.
If his eyes could still express shock, they would.
“You’re a machine,” I growl as he sparks, one arm gone entirely limp. “They want to use you like one. You think you are coming for me. You are not coming for me, Rath K’zar. You are playing the role they have had in mind for you since they decided I was an unsuitable puppet.”
He tries to hit me with his remaining good arm. I laugh and barely dodge back as he swings unsteadily. He cannot orient himself properly because his broken augmentations are going haywire. I broke him within seconds of engaging him in combat. He never saw it coming. Rath has been weakened by his experiences among weaker creatures. He has come to face me with arrogance and little more.
I laugh. I laugh at the top of my lungs, delighted peals which blend with the bells still attempting to announce my death. Finally, I am going to kill Rath K’zar. Then I will kill every traitor in the palace, including Tusk.
Tusk. Where is…
“Behind you, sire.”
I swirl around to face the old traitor, only to find that he has abandoned his plan to have Rath kill me and is instead going to do it himself. The weapon in his hand is trained directly on me.
“You’ve never made anything easy, have you, Krush?" he says.
Then he pulls the trigger.
Eleven
Krush
I wake in a small room made of rock, with a barred steel door on one side and little else in the chamber. It is so very small I can only assume I have been put into some old storage closet. Then I realize it is a storage closet. For me.
For a moment, I have no memory of what has just happened. I have to work out what has happened to me by context. The electric current making the golden strands of my hair float apart from one another makes me think I was shot with a stun weapon on high voltage.
Then it all comes back. Another fuzkin’ betrayal. Memories flash through my stunned cortex. I know I put up a hell of a fight. It took every damn soldier in the ambush to take me down. I know I did damage. There is blood all over me, and most of it is not mine. I hope I killed them. I can’t remember, most of it is a blur. There were enemies and there was me in the middle of them all. They were blue, purple, green, all the colors of korabi. Only I was gold. Only I had the right to destroy them as they attempted to detain me… and then Rath fuzkin’ K’zar. And Tusk.
“You’re awake.”
A voice comes to me from the grille in the door. I can see Tyvian standing on the other side. I want to rage and roar. I want to dash myself against the bars and bend them until they break.
“Not as nice as the human rooms, Tyvian.”
Tyvian gives me a look somewhere between pity and indulgence. “The human rooms would hardly hold you, sire.”
He called me ‘sire’ out of habit, and he has a little too much in the way of good grace to correct himself out loud. I am no longer king in his eyes, I am sure. That title was stripped away from me when I was yet again betrayed. I am beginning to think that treachery and disloyalty are simply the way of the world. Expecting anybody to be on my side is evidently too grand an expectation.